"Development practices are being modernized.. You can make a difference.."

StarStarStarStarStar

Work/Life Balance

Culture & Values

Career Opportunities

Comp & Benefits

Senior Management

Current Employee - Senior Software Developer in New York, NY

Current Employee - Senior Software Developer in New York, NY

Recommends

Positive Outlook

Approves of CEO

I have been working at Bloomberg L.P. full-time (More than a year)

Pros

- Many people have commented that there is a lot of legacy code and outdated practices. This is true, however, since upper management within R&D has been shaken up, a large amount of investment is being made in infrastructure and dev practices.- The talent level (at least within my team) is absolutely top-notch.- Difficult and interesting problems.- If you don't like your team, you can move every 18 months.- Very flat hierarchy.- BDE software development methodology.- Amazing guest sparkers.- Increasing it's contributions to the open source world (see BDE on Github)- The compensation is good if you are seen as a top performer.- Great health care

I'm very happy to work for a organization that cares as much about it's employees as Bloomberg. I think the company is on a positive trajectory, and the best is yet to come.

Cons

- There is a incredible amount of legacy code. Much is old fortran and C.- Steep learning curve.- You'll be capped at four weeks off. I'm not certain, but I think the whole company gets 4 weeks off.- The high talent level, means if you are looking to be a manager, it'll take a while.

Advice to Management

Continue to invest in developer productivity and training. At least within my team, there is always more work to be done then could ever get done. Our project management and bug tracking systems could really use some TLC. Also, we build software like complete amateurs, we should invest in better build management tools. We could also use better automated testing frameworks and facilities. Improvements are being made, it would just be nice to have a greater emphasis placed on unit and acceptance testing.

Awesome gold-plated benefits and office.Some interesting problems in some groups. However it is completely dependent on the group.Good summer party.Generally smart colleagues who are nice to work with.Generally meritocratic.

Cons

When the benefits and colleagues are the high point of your day, something is wrong with the work.With the exception of a few groups, chances are you will be working on an ancient software stack where the focus is to do a paint job and ship features as soon as possible. Not only is R&D management aware of this, the senior most managers actively evangelize paint jobs and to leave the rotting guts alone. This goes against every engineer's basic instincts. Industry standard software practices such as unit testing, high availability, integration testing, quality control are verbally supported but not practically espoused in the over-arching Time-To-Market company motto.As an engineer, if you make peace with the fact that this is not a software company or a tech company by a long shot, you will be happy. Unfortunately, that also means that your skills deteriorate over time and with my shift to a startup I had to face an exceedingly steep learning curve.With all the myth propagated by management that compensation is top-notch, it is not. It is above average but not in the league of software companies offering equity. I left to join a small startup and got pretty much what I was making and some(equity).Hmmm management .... need I say more? All the reviews talk of terrible management and it is true. As an engineer you will not be treated as a professional, but as an untrustworthy resource that needs to be constantly monitored. This is reflected in their recent inability to hire engineers to fill open positions.

Advice to Management

None. Management is made up of old-school finance types who are quite insular. Moreover, the company is still insanely profitable, ergo the thinking goes management must be doing something right and they really don't need any advice.